RADIO TIDBITS

Mark "Foamer" Levin has been calling Obama a Marxist and trying to make people afraid of the coming Stalinist state. Today he mentioned with approval F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman as he was trying to defend the Free Market Fairy. He didn't bother to tell his listeners that Hayek thought people like Levin were so terrible, he decided not to call himself a conservative. Levin was also firmly against the supposedly evil wealth re-distribution proposed by Obama and didn't mention that Milton Friedman himself proposed an early version of the Earned Income Tax Credit which he called the negative income tax. Bruce Bartlett notes that even St. Ronnie Reagan supported the EITC.

Levin also claimed that Colin Powell endorsed Obama for purely "racial reasons," echoing what Fats Limbaugh said, and attacked conservatives Peggy Noonan and Michael Smerconish for straying from ideological purity.

Sean Hannity was up to his old trick of blaming the Democrats for just about everything that goes wrong, a tactic that Dave Neiwert found is common among the wingnuts. This afternoon, he tried to blame the collapse of the stock market on Obama's taxation plans. In his view, people are selling now because they want to take advantage of the lower capital gains tax before Obama raises the rate.

"Slots" Bennett, the author of a book on morality, will have the extremist Rep. Michele Bachmann on his show tomorrow in what I assume will be an attempt to help her get past her hateful and divisive comments on HARDBALL.